Articles in category: Cutting-Edge Tech

It's been a year of change in the enterprise software market. SaaS providers are fighting to compete with one another, machine learning is becoming a reality for businesses at a larger scale, and containers are growing in popularity. Here are some of the top trends from 2016 that we'll likely still be talking about next year.

BMW has already staked its claim in the self-driving production timeline, with plans to release an autonomous electric car by 2021. To help meet that goal, the carmaker is opening a dedicated facility aimed at developing connected and automated driving tech in Unterschleissheim, Germany near Munich. The facility is designed to begin operations in mid-2017, and will host more than 2,000 employees once it’s fully completed.

Software development is a moving target. You have to keep your eye on trends in the tech space that haven’t even happened yet just to stay current. Consider what’s happened with augmented reality (AR) in this year alone. If you said you were working on an AR app in 2015, you might have gotten a lot of blank stares or jokes about Google Glass.

IBM and NASA have had one of the longest, most successful relationships in the high-tech world and it looks like the future holds much the same. While the relationship has its roots in the very beginnings of the space program as well as large-scale computing, its current incarnation in many cases revolves around the cognitive computing specialties found in IBM’s Watson system.

During Microsoft’s Build Conference earlier this year, CEO Satya Nadella delivered the three-hour keynote address, in which he highlighted his belief that the future of technology lies in human language. In this new wave of technology, conversation is the new interface, and “bots are the new apps.” The big tech enterprises are all entering the chatbot space, and many startups are too. Why is so much attention being given to chatbots recently, and should your business be paying attention too?

The tech giant closes its $26.2 billion acquisition of the business social network. The two companies said on Thursday that their acquisition deal had closed. This comes six months after news broke that Microsoft was planning to throw down $26.2 billion for the business social network -- its biggest-ever acquisition.

KKR, the global investment firm, is announcing a $711 million close this morning on its KKR Next Generation Technology Growth Fund, which it plans to use to back growth-stage companies in the technology, media and telco industries in North America, Europe and Israel. It’s a new product for the firm, though you might have seen its name crop up in a good many deals this past year; that’s because it began investing it nearly year ago. Among the bets it has made are the big data analytics company Optimal+ ; the tour-booking platform GetYourGuide; the cloud integration software company ...

Imagine a computing platform that would have no single point of failure and would be resilient to the cyberattacks that are making the headlines these days. This is the promise behind blockchain, the distributed ledger that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and challenges the traditional server/client paradigm.

For once, there will be a ceasefire in the war between major chip architectures x86, ARM and Power9, which will all be used in a supercomputer being built in Barcelona. The MareNostrum 4 is being built by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and will have three clusters, each of which will house Intel x86, ARM and Power9 chips. Those clusters will be linked to form a supercomputer that will deliver up to 13.7 petaflops of performance. All three architectures have never been implemented together in a supercomputer, let alone PCs or servers. It raises questions on how the architectures will ...

As the PC market levels out, Intel believes it has a big future in autonomous cars. It's the new hot market the company is chasing, much like it did with mobile devices in recent years. Autonomous cars are so significant to Intel that the company on Tuesday said it is establishing the Automated Driving Group, which will focus on developing hardware and software technology for self-driving vehicles.

Accenture (NYSE: ACN ) has opened a Liquid Studio in Milan, Italy designed to help organizations accelerate innovation by quickly transforming ideas into applications and services using the latest technologies, intelligent automation, help clients ideate and rapidly design, create, test and deliver innovative software applications with contemporary architectures, and leading software development methods.

The internet of things is so complex that some enterprises would rather turn to one vendor to determine the business case for an IoT deployment, design the system, roll it out, and operate it as a service.At least that’s what IBM believes. The company’s combining several of its products and services into what it calls the IoT Solutions Practice. The move, announced Monday, is designed so customers can find all of IBM’s IoT offerings in one place.

The dream of creating intelligent computers has inspired the development of exotic chips based on the structure of the brain, which operates in mysterious ways. Some researchers are making such chips from components found in today's computers. Using components pulled off store shelves, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have made a chip for intelligent computers that can learn. The chips are structured to discover patterns through probabilities and association, helping with decision making.

More and more companies are working to adapt 2D visualization systems for a 3D world. From the Lower Manhattan offices of New York architecture firm SHoP, you can explore buildings around the world—including ones that don’t yet exist. You can walk along the edges of an under-construction building in Botswana, then toggle over to the torpedo hold of the USS Intrepid on Manhattan’s West Side. But be careful, when you reach out to touch a missile you might just poke an architect, standing just beyond you and your VR goggles.

With 2017 fast approaching, technology trends that will keep gathering steam in the new year range from augmented and virtual reality to machine intelligence, Docker, and microservices, according to technology consulting firm ThoughtWorks

When it comes to recruitment, the U.S. manufacturing industry has taken a multi-decade hit. High school and college institutions have reduced the emphasis on skills-based education and public perception has been tarnished by recessions and layoffs—not to mention the inaccurate perception that manufacturing is outdated, dirty, repetitive work. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Today’s manufacturing plant floor is a vibrant network of people, materials, and high-tech equipment that moves with precision and efficiency. MFC Netform Corporation, maker of cold-formed metal components used for powertrains in automotive and agriculture, is a perfect example.

The Renault-Nissan Alliance has created a new 300-person division for the purpose of releasing at least 10 vehicles with "significant" autonomous driving capabilities by 2020.Nissan and Renault's new Mobility Division will focus on the development of software, cloud engineering and big data analytics for connected-car technologies.

Mention artificial intelligence and a discussion about the robot wipeout of humankind is sure to follow. It's a technology as strongly associated with creation as it is with destruction.It's also a technology that businesses will increasingly trust in decision-making, Gartner analysts said Monday at the research firm's annual Symposium/ITxpo.

Information technology evolves through disruption waves. First the computer, then the web and eventually social networks and smartphones all had the power to revolutionize how people live and how businesses operate. They destroyed companies that weren’t able to adapt, while creating new winners in growing markets.

Can a chatbot help you manage your money? Three London-based fintech startups are betting on the answer being yes and have jumped aboard the messaging gravy train as they seek to entice millennials to their respective platforms.

The search giant wants to beat Apple and Amazon to a fully voice-enabled interface. Even though it was billed as a hardware event, Google’s product launch Tuesday was really about artificial intelligence, which is now under the hood of almost all the new gear coming out this year.

A massive DDOS attack and weaknesses in critical systems have put security concerns front and center in the internet of things. IBM thinks a technology best known from the world of bitcoin could lock down at least one use of IoT. The company is using blockchain technology to ensure that everything’s in order with IoT transactions.

Machine learning is a buzzword in the technology world right now, and for good reason: It represents a major step forward in how computers can learn. Very basically, a machine learning algorithm is given a “teaching set” of data, then asked to use that data to answer a question.

The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whomever owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft have a ton of power. In an act of self-governance, these five companies came together today to announce the launch the new Partnership on AI.